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Commandos deployed as Afghan army conflict Taliban for control of cities



KANDAHAR:

Afghan army battled Monday to stop a initial provincial city from descending to a Taliban following weekend offensives from a insurgents on civic centres in a critical escalation in fighting.

Taliban fighters assaulted during slightest 3 provincial capitals overnight – Lashkar Gah, Kandahar and Herat – after a weekend of complicated fighting that saw thousands of civilians rush a advancing militants.

Fighting raged in Helmand’s provincial collateral Lashkar Gah, where a Taliban launched concurrent attacks on a city centre and a jail – usually hours after a supervision announced a deployment of hundreds of commandos to a area.

Fighting has strong given early May, with a insurgents capitalising on a final stages of a withdrawal of US-led unfamiliar army after roughly 20 years.

“Afghan army on a belligerent and by atmosphere strikes detered a attack,” a infantry in Helmand pronounced of a conflict on Lashkar Gah.

Resident Hawa Malalai warned of a flourishing predicament in a city: “There is fighting, energy cuts, ill people in hospital, a telecommunication networks are down. There are no medicines and pharmacies are closed.”

Read: Taliban rockets strike Kandahar airfield in Afghanistan, flights suspended

Helmand for years was a centrepiece of a US and British infantry debate in Afghanistan – usually for it to trip deeper into instability.

The range saw some of a fiercest fighting between unfamiliar army and a Taliban over a years – along with high casualties – when tens of thousands of infantry poured in for former US boss Barack Obama’s surge.

The immeasurable poppy fields in a provinces yield a lion’s share of a drug for a general heroin trade – creation it a remunerative source of taxation and money for a Taliban’s fight chest.

The detriment of a Helmand collateral would be a vast critical and psychological blow for a government, that affianced to urge provincial capitals during all costs after losing many of a farming panorama to a Taliban over a summer.

Fighting also raged in some districts of Kandahar, a former citadel of a insurgents, and on a hinterland of a provincial capital.

Kandahar airfield came underneath conflict overnight Sunday, with a Taliban banishment rockets that shop-worn a runway, heading to a cessation of flights for several hours.

The trickery is critical to progressing a logistics and atmosphere support indispensable to keep a Taliban from overrunning a city, while also providing aerial cover for vast tracts of southern Afghanistan – including circuitously Lashkar Gah.

In a west, hundreds of commandos were also fortifying Herat after days of extreme fighting.

“The hazard is high in these 3 provinces… though we are dynamic to repel their attacks,” Afghan confidence army orator Ajmal Omar Shinwari told reporters on Sunday, adding it was an “emergency situation”.

The constraint of any critical civic centre by a Taliban would take their stream descent to another turn and fuel concerns that a army is unqualified of facing a advances.

“If Afghan cities fall… a US preference to repel from Afghanistan will be remembered as one of a many important critical blunders in American unfamiliar policy,” Australia-based Afghanistan consultant Nishank Motwani told AFP.

Read more: Taliban fighters enter provincial capital, strife with Afghan forces

It will uncover that Washington “abandoned a many pro-American supervision in a segment to radical Islamists that trust in branch to rubble all that has been built over a past dual decades”.

Kabul has regularly discharged a militants’ solid gains over a summer as lacking critical value, though has mostly unsuccessful to retreat their momentum.

The Taliban have seized Afghan cities in a past though have defended them usually briefly.

The insurgents overran Kunduz twice in 2015 and 2016, and quickly hold control of Ghazni city after environment fervent pivotal supervision buildings and destroying telecommunication towers.

In new weeks a Afghan government’s atmosphere force, corroborated by a US military, has supposing Kabul with a biggest terrain advantage over a Taliban and has so distant mostly kept a insurgents from overrunning civic areas.

Despite being in a final stages of withdrawal a US infantry has also carried out atmosphere strikes targeting a Taliban.

“The US infantry has been intent in a singular way, though in a poignant one that has impact in assembly the obligations to urge Afghan army when they are underneath attack,” tip US attach� in Kabul Ross Wilson told reporters this week.